Salesforce just reported they beat analysts estimates, had a good quarter, and grew another 43% versus the quarter a year ago.  Same growth the reported last quarter. 

I can’t tell you how many arguments I’ve been involved in where there was someone trying to say that SaaS is a very limited phenomenon, that it hasn’t impacted any large players yet, that it won’t ever go into very many markets (“just a few are suited to SaaS”), that it isn’t a megatrend in the same sense client-server or thin clients were, SAP grows as much as the whole SaaS industry’s total size every year, and on and on.  The last time I was in one of these I was told that I just sounded too “boring and desperate” to make SaaS seem like a winning strategy.

But here comes Salesforce wtih good numbers again.  Here came Concur again with good numbers.  Even NetSuite, which has to sell a whole ERP suite (one of the areas these anti-SaaS pundits seem to argue can’t be penetrated by SaaS) seems to be doing reasonably well against the backdrop of this economy.

Like so many paradigm shifts, SaaS seems to be analagous to a war time piece of advice:

Despite how loud artillery seems to be, you never hear the shell that lands in your own foxhole.

The last print edition of PC Magazine goes out this January.  It’s the end of an era.

As much as I like the online world, I also love magazines, and PC Magazine was at one time my absolute favorite.  But I haven’t read the magazine in years, so I suppose I’m as guilty as the next guy for its demise.

You could as easily bemoan the passing of the Camaros and Firebirds that were the hot cars in my high school days.  Perhaps this is where GM lost the plot.  Ford was able to keep the mustang revved up.  It wasn’t just a commodity, it was an interesting car. 

Did something similar befall PC Magazine?  Hard to say with certainty, but for me, so many things it used to report on became commoditized that it was no longer interesting.  PC’s were highly commoditized to the point I didn’t care about their reviews of desktop or laptop PC’s.  Instead I turned to building my own PC’s with custom cases and overclocked cpu’s to keep it interesting: shades of the car hot rodding culture. 

At the same time I was pursuing the most bleeding edge performance enhancements to be made to PC’s, I discovered the online PC counterculture.  There were hundreds of PC modding boards that had everything from articles that were just as interesting as the magazine articles, but also communities, which were something I couldn’t even get from the magazines.

PC Magazine may have simply fallen out of touch with that Early Adopter/Influencer crowd that I enjoy being a part of.  Ironically, Bill Machrone, the founding editor of PC Mag, is still around and doing the kind of hands-on work with computers and electronics that I craved from PC Mag and that vanished from its pages.

Raise a toast to the old PC Magazine (and its many cousins–InfoWorld, Computerworld, PC World, etc.), say a fond farewell, and ask whether your product or company is staying fresh with the people that matter, or whether you’re headed down the commodity path.

Related Article

Fred Wilson writes about how important it is for him to blog and about how his article on Boxee led to 100 requests for invitations to their private beta.  His sentiment about why this may be important is related to what I’m trying to say about avoiding the commodity world as your only interested audience:

I know that one person out of the 100 I invited this morning will be incredibly impactful for boxee. It could be five people, it could be ten. Who knows?

But in the world of social media, word of mouth and word of link marketing, it is connectors and influencers like all of you that make the difference.

And that’s one of the main reasons I keep writing, commenting, discussing, and participating in blogs, tumblr, twitter, disqus, and the social media world at large.

Its about the “realest” work I do.

It is the loss of those connectors and influencers that leaves you with an audience that won’t sustain you.  Fred is right: sustaining that sort of audience is the “realest” work you can do too.

Another flurry of “OMG, there’s still no Flash on the iPhone!” articles have appeared.  Wired Magazine talks at length about how it can’t be done without violating Apple’s terms of service:

Allowing Flash — which is a development platform of its own — would just be too dangerous for Apple, a company that enjoys exerting total dominance over its hardware and the software that runs on it. Flash has evolved from being a mere animation player into a multimedia platform capable of running applications of its own. That means Flash would open a new door for application developers to get their software onto the iPhone: Just code them in Flash and put them on a web page. In so doing, Flash would divert business from the App Store, as well as enable publishers to distribute music, videos and movies that could compete with the iTunes Store.

Lots more blah, blah, blah.  Like this is news?  I explained all this months ago.  Why aren’t people talking about the obvious solution?

Of course Apple doesn’t want a Trojan Horse like Flash or anything similar to provide a back door so that you can get any app onto the iPhone just by clicking a web link.  DUH!

If that’s the problem, isn’t the answer easy?  Adobe needs to approach Apple with an offer that the Flash player will only accept signed Flash programs. This would be a useful capability for Flash anyway.  It can be made optional to the general population, but mandatory on the iPhone.  That way, Flash programs must have a certificate before iPhone will play them back.  All that certificate stuff can happen in the background very quickly and quietly.  We already use the technology all over the web anyway.  And why shouldn’t Apple be able to control what plays on the iPhone if they want to?

So now, as we’re blaming Apple for the lack of Flash, we need to ask ourselves where is Adobe in offering this kind of capability and compromise?  Why can’t that work and be done quickly and easily?

Remember Lean Forward versus Sit Back?  A friend of mine was active in two different home entertainment startups and taught me the concept.  When you’re at a PC, you’re “leaning forward”.  When you’re watching the TV, you’re “sitting back”.  So the Interactive TV world of the day (don’t hear much from them lately) wanted everyone to “sit back”. 

Nothing wrong with either one, but you have to be careful predicting one is the universal truth and not the other, because they represent completely different modes of interaction rather than competing modes.  Yes, there is overlap, but it’s not that large.

This morning I was reading Tim O’Reilly on Mobile devices and was struck by the same feeling.  He tells a fine anecdote about what mobile can do, but then concludes with the following:

I think about the web as experienced on a PC, and then about mobile as an add on. The tipping point has come; that notion has to flip: if we’re trying to get ahead of the curve, we need to think first about the phone, and then think about the PC browser experience as the add-on.

There’s that unfortunate and very Western desire that all things must compete with only one winner.  Why does this thinking constantly rear its ugly head?  Why must there be a tipping point that favors only one?  Tim doesn’t really say.  At best I can speculate it is a tipping point in terms of where we must turn for hype and buzz value, but I don’t see any tipping point from a user experience standpoint.

I love my iPhone for the web experience it can provide, but I also love the 30″ monitor and dual CPU four core PC that I’m composing this blog post on.  Would I rather write the post on the iPhone?  No, certainly not.  But that’s not really my point.  The real issue is I would never even stop to think about which one to choose.  For most activities, the choice is obvious. 

Getting back to the anecdote that prompted Tim’s remark, it involved dinner table conversation and the inability to answer a question.  No PC was available, but the fellow who had to say, “I don’t know”, had forgotten was his 4 year old daughter reminded him: he could get the answer from his phone.

Being able to answer a question at dinner is hardly a reason to think it is the time to flip.  Embrace both platforms.  It is definitely a reason to ask yourself how your users can benefit from your application while they are away from their PC’s.

At Helpstream, we face this issue in a couple of ways.  As a customer service application, someone could have one of those questions while away from the PC, and they’d want to be able to answer it.   Even more importantly, some of our customers are selling mobile device software and want their users to be able to get answers from their phones.  We’ve taken the approach of making sure both the web browser client and email can be used for these interactions.  Some phones are better at one versus another.